CHAPTER 9: THE SMALLEST HANDS
The first thing Sable understood was that her mother's hand was cold.
It had not been cold when she first took it. It had been warm then, warmer than it should have been, the last heat of the fire still living in the wrist. She had held it and screamed until her voice tore and something in her throat tasted like blood. Now the warmth was gone, and the hand was just a hand, stiff and blackened at the edges, the ring on the finger fused to the skin.
She did not know how long she had knelt there. Long enough for the light to change. Long enough for the crows to come.
She had watched the man in the ash. She had watched the tall one with the horns of a devil from the stories, and the boy who had eaten at Tomas's table for a week and fixed the widow's fence. She had watched the light come out of the tall one's fingers and swallow the boy whole. It had made no sound. That was the worst of it. It was quieter than the wash water in the tub.
The tall one had looked around afterward, bored, like a man leaving a tavern. He had walked straight past her. He had stepped over her mother's hand like it was a puddle, and he had not looked down once.
Then he was gone, and there was only the smoke, and the crows, and a smell she would carry in her nose for the rest of her life. Sweet, and wrong, and greasy. Like the pig at the harvest feast, if the pig had been someone she knew.
"Mama," she whispered.
Nothing answered. Nothing was going to.
She laid the hand down gently against what was left of the body it belonged to. She pressed it there the way she would have tucked a blanket. "I'm sorry," she said. "I have to go. I'll come back. I promise I'll come back."
It was the first lie she ever told that she knew was a lie.
He was still alive.
She did not understand how. She stood over him at the edge of the square, small and shaking, and looked at what the light had left of the boy. His clothes were gone, or they had become part of him, black cloth melted into black skin. One arm was bent the wrong way beneath him. The side of his face had split and curled back like the peel of a burnt apple, and under it the meat was wet and red and shining. His hair was gone. His lips were gone. But his chest was moving, a slow, wet, rattling rise and fall, and every breath sounded like something tearing.
The crows had already found him. One stood on his thigh, tilting its head, considering.
"Get off," Sable said. Her voice came out cracked and tiny. She picked up a piece of charred timber twice as long as her arm and swung it. The crow lifted away, screaming its complaint, and settled again on the roof of the burned tavern to wait.
It would wait. She could see that. It had all the time in the world.
She crouched and touched his shoulder. The skin slid under her fingers. It came away like wet paper, and she snatched her hand back and bit down on her own knuckle to keep from being sick. A thin sound came out of the boy, not a word, just breath forced through a ruined throat.
"I know," she whispered. "I know it hurts. I'm sorry. I have to move you."
She did not know where. She only knew that the square was wrong, that the open sky was wrong, that anything that looked at them from above was hungry. She looked around at the blackened frames and the smoking beams and the bodies she would not let herself count, and then she saw it, at the far end of the lane, standing whole and untouched among the ruin.
Tomas's house.
The fire had not touched it. The thatch was dry. The door hung open the way he always left it, like the world had never given him a reason to lock it. It made no sense, and she was too young and too tired to wonder why. She only knew that it was standing, and that it had walls.
She took the boy under the arms, and she pulled.
It was dark.
Isakk knew the dark. He had spent a childhood in it, in the Gutter Quarter, in the punishment cells, in the disposal pit under the bodies. But this dark was different. It had no floor and no edges. It had no pain either, and that frightened him more than anything, because pain was the only proof he had ever had that he was still there.
"You're awake," someone said. "Good. I was starting to think I'd have to sit here forever."
He knew the voice. It sat behind his ribs most days. It had whispered at him over fences and water buckets. But it did not sound like it had before.
She was crouched a few paces off, small and pale, wearing the shape of the girl from the ruined village. But the smile was missing. Her hands hung loose between her knees, and there was no mockery in her face at all. She looked tired. She looked, if he was honest, a little like something that had been left out in the rain.
"He's gone," Isakk said.
"For now. He got bored. That's his mercy. It's the only kind he has." She turned her head. "You're dying, you know. Your body is mostly ash. The only reason your heart's still beating is that a seven year old girl has decided it should."
Something in his chest lurched. "Sable."
"She's dragging you through the square right now. She's very slow. It's very sad." Xerile said it flatly, like reading a list. "Tomas's house is still standing. I imagine he wanted you to find it that way."
"Diavlos said you were his."
The quiet stretched.
"Yes," she said.
"He said he sent you. That he told you to die."
"Yes."
"Was any of it real?"
She was silent for a long time. When she answered, it was without any of the theater he had come to expect from her, the lazy cruelty, the little smirk she wore like a coat.
"I've been his for four hundred years," she said. "Most of that time I was enough. I don't expect you to understand what that means. To be a thing that someone keeps close because you're useful. Then one night he looks down at a broken boy in the dirt, and he says, I want a new one. And he says, go die for him. And I did. I walked into that village wearing a child's face and I let you cut me open, because he told me to. I was very good at it."
Isakk said nothing. He felt something cold and heavy turn over in his stomach. He did not know what to do with it.
"I hated you," she went on. "I want you to know that. It wasn't your fault. You hadn't done anything. But he looked at you the way he used to look at me, and I hated you for it. And then you bit my throat open in the ash and set me on fire, and I thought, good. Let him have him. Let him see what it's like." She almost smiled. It was a terrible thing to see. "I never told you any of it. I let you think I was just a demon trying to lead you astray. It was easier."
"Why tell me now?"
"Because you're about to die and I don't want to be the only one who knows." She raised her eyes, and they were very old. "And because there's a choice. I've been sitting here trying to decide if I'd offer it."
He waited.
"I can give you what's left of me. Not a little at a time, not whispers and tricks. All of it. It will burn out whatever the light left alive, and it will knit the rest together, and you will wake up. But it won't be clean. It never is." She looked at the shape of him in the dark, whatever he was down here, whatever the dark had decided to show. "It eats the soft parts, Isakk. The parts that mend fences and carry water. That's what I'm made of. That's what I do. I can't give you power without giving you some of the thing that made me."
He almost laughed. It hurt, even here.
"There isn't much soft left."
"There's more than you think." Her voice had gone very quiet. "That's the worst part. There's a great deal."
The dark shuddered. Far away, under everything, he heard something. It was faint and cracked and off key, a thin little thread of sound trailing through the black like a dropped string. A child humming. She was humming to keep herself from crying, he realized. It was the song the miller's wife sang in the square.
"She's still pulling," Xerile said softly.
Isakk closed his eyes, though he had no eyes, and thought of a bowl of stew. He thought of a stubborn old man's hand waving away a thank you. He thought of a seven year old asking why he wouldn't stay forever.
"Then do it," he said.
The door was too heavy.
Sable pushed with her shoulder until her arm shook. It gave inch by inch. She dragged the boy over the threshold on his back, and the skin on his back left a dark wet streak on the floorboards that she would never be able to scrub out. She did not try. She did not have time.
Tomas's bed was in the corner. It had a straw mattress and a patched blanket and a dent in the pillow where the old man's head had rested every night for forty years. Sable got one of his arms over her shoulder. She counted, one, two, three, and heaved, and the weight of him nearly took her to the floor. Something popped in her wrist. She did not scream. She had screamed enough for one lifetime.
She got his shoulders onto the mattress. Then his hips. Then she stood there, gasping, shaking, with his blood down the front of her dress and her mother's ash under her nails.
She looked at him for a long time.
"You said you'd only kill it if it deserved it," she whispered. "You said that."
The boy did not answer.
"He deserved it. The tall one. He deserved it." Her chin trembled. Her small hands balled up in her ruined skirt. "So you have to get up. Okay? You have to get up and do it. You promised."
She had never heard him promise anything, not really. But she had decided that he had. It was the only thing left in the world she could decide.
She dragged the bolt across the door, and she pulled a stool under the latch, and she climbed onto the floor beside the bed with her knees to her chest and her back against the wall. She did not cry. She was too tired for it. She only watched the shape of his chest, rising, falling, rising, falling, and she began to hum again, off key, because it was the only thing she knew how to do that made the dark less large.
Outside, the crows settled on the empty rooftops and waited.
And on the boy's ruined right hand, beneath the ash and the blistered skin, a line of black began to glow.